


Speaking in Tongues

by 221b_hound



Series: Captains of Industry [25]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Bored Sherlock, M/M, Sherlock's pen moustache
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 14:31:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7056391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day, Sherlock gets very bored between cases. He decides to practise disguises by drawing a moustache on his lip and pretending to be a French waiter. The trouble is, nobody actually notices its fake, and it's driving him bonkers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speaking in Tongues

**Author's Note:**

> Dack=pull someone's pants down, trousers, jocks and all. The US term for this is 'pantsing'.

The Baker Street Agency runs hot-and-cold out of its office at the corner of Captains of Industry. Some days the stories people bring to him are fascinating, bizarre, splendidly peculiar and, once or twice, excitingly action-packed. John always manages to get Violet to cover for him for those, or they manage them out of hours. Anyway, Mrs Hudson indulges them because word is getting round, custom is on the increase and it is a win-win situation.

In balance, sometimes there are days on end without any kind of client at all, not even the tedious ones. Sherlock runs security protocols for his old IT clients, but once they’re set up, the program does the rest, and he sprawls around the café like a poet dying of consumption: looking pale and interesting, lamenting the sorry intellectual state of the universe and pining for something to keep his brain engaged.

John is adept finding old mysteries from ancient newspaper stories in the online Trove archive. He also has a knack for engaging parts of Sherlock that are not his brain – a lunchtime blowjob is always a popular option. He once convinced Sherlock to spend the afternoon in his Captains of Industry office while wearing a butt plug and a pair of really pretty sky blue panties, with the promise of a good, long fucking on their balcony after they got home. Sherlock spent his afternoon quiet as a mouse and hard as a rock. He had to hurry home with his coat tight about him because his panties and suit trousers were soaked through with pre-come. Frankly, John hadn’t been able to get his honey home, dack him and bugger him senseless fast enough. (Sherlock had come all over their lucky bamboo plant in the corner, and now refers to the fast-growing plant as ‘their stripling son’, but that’s another story.)

On this particular day, Sherlock is so bored that he has spent an hour and a half working out how to make his way from Docklands to Carlton without taking a single major street – some of which includes using grappling hooks and flying foxes to go from roof to roof – and then he spots the marker pen on the desk.

Geniuses sometimes do remarkably ridiculous things.

This genius decides he should practise the art of sudden, makeshift disguises by drawing on a moustache.

He peers at his reflection in the window and with a flourish, gives himself a dapper upper lip – just a small dash on each side of his cupid’s bow. No sense in overdoing it, he thinks.

Then he sticks his fingers in his hair to ruffle it out of his usual severe style, so that the curls are free to fall over his brow.

He takes off his coat, pulls out the spare pair of reading glasses he keeps in the desk here, and tugs off his tie.

Finally, he sort of prances out into the café proper to say hello to John, who is pouring shots in the middle of the busy lunch period.

“ _Bonjour, Jean_!” Sherlock declares in a faultless French accent, “I am ‘ere to work!”

John looks at him, blinks once, and says, “Table four, in the corner. Flat white for him, long black with a dash of milk for her.”

He returns to pouring shots while Sherlock picks up the coffee order and transports it to Table Four. He moves like a dancer who is trying not to break into a rapid foxtrot; his agitated energy counterbalanced only by his natural grace.

“Voila!” says Sherlock, depositing coffees with a flourish. He smiles winningly at the couple, but they pay him no attention now they have their coffee, and he swoops back to John.

“Brother and sister,” he whispers to John, “Going into business together. It’ll be a disaster. He has a gambling habit she doesn’t know about. Who’s this for?”

Violet takes up the coffees, gives Sherlock a sideways look which easily translates into _What are you up to now, you adorable lunatic?_ And takes the order away.

A bell dings at the kitchen, the chef calls out “Service!” and Violet shoulders past him to get that, too. Well, Sherlock concedes, he didn’t know where to deliver the sandwich anyway.

He resolves this dilemma by taking up the waiting reins. He begins to bus tables. He gives menu recommendations, takes orders, and delivers food and coffee and glasses of the home-made ginger beer. He deduces too, and makes reports back to John, who is vastly entertained by his little faux-French tattle-tale darling.

Sherlock tries harder and harder to get the clientele to notice that his face is adorned in fakery.

“Blow bubbles through le straw to meex in the syrup,” he suggests to one; “The triple cheese sandwich, _c’est parfait!_ ” he declares to another.

Each order taken, each brief chat, each delivery made, he pauses and poses dramatically, but to no avail. Nobody notices that he is not French, that he is not a waiter, that his moustache is drawn on with a pen. It’s not that they’re being polite. He’d know if they’d seen it, and they have not.

At the espresso machine, John is grinning because he sees what Sherlock is up to, and he can hear Sherlock deliberately speaking worse and worse French in an accent that sounds more and more like Pepe Le Peu, trying desperately to get someone to _observe something, for the love of god!_

Nobody does. Mycroft doesn’t count, especially now that he and Greg are watching from Mycroft’s studio and are laying bets on how soon Sherlock will leap onto a table and begin to sing _La_ _Marseillaise_ (or _Je Ne Regrette Rien_ ) out of despair.

It’s not until Sally Donovan makes her first appearance, staggering to a table, that things change. Half asleep, with the pre-coffee grumps, she doesn’t even look at the skinny new waiter asking, in a French accent, for her order. She gives it without looking up, waves faintly at her sweet Molly, who is cutting someone’s hair in the barber chair.

When a long, white hand delivers her standard order – a long macchiato with three sugars as a wake-me-up; a strong skinny latte, one sugar, as a chaser – she peers up at him and says:

“Nice ironic moustache. Are you going for ‘hipster-perv’? Ditch the glasses and go with a monocle, especially with that accent.”

Then Sally downs the macchiato, sips her latte, and doesn’t even bother wondering why Sherlock is conducting weird experiments. That’s just part of life at Captains of Industry these days.

Sherlock, for his part, is so relieved that somebody finally noticed that he brings her a _madeleine_ _,_ his treat. _  
_

Later, at home, Sherlock digs up a monocle he does indeed own and seduces his giggling John with French, French kissing and the other kind of Frenching, while John cries out his orgasm in good old Anglo-Saxon.

(Even later still, John speaks in tongues too, rewarding his clever boy with the rimming of a lifetime. Real moustaches are far superior to marker-pen moustaches in this field of endeavour, which Sherlock will cheerfully concede, when he gets his breath back. And also the use of his lower body.)

**Author's Note:**

> A reminder of Sherlock's ironic hipster-perv moustache:  
> 
> 
> Trove is an online archive of Australian newspapers.
> 
> Here is an entry from the [ Adelaide Advertiser, 16/9/1920 talking about Conan Doyle's lectures in that city. ](http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/37076983?searchTerm=Arthur%20Conan%20Doyle&searchLimits=#)
> 
> Here is another from Adelaide's The Mail [giving a bit of ACD's background in December 1933 ](http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/58627963?searchTerm=Arthur%20Conan%20Doyle&searchLimits=) with a photo of him as a small boy.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [PODFIC 'Speaking in Tongues' written and read by 221b_hound](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10076405) by [221b_hound](https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound), [missmuffin221](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmuffin221/pseuds/missmuffin221)




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